Beware: Pinterest can be a time suck. Limit your recipe browsing for one specific day per week, like Sundays, when you can plan your weekly menu and shopping list.

Create separate boards for different topics, such as drinks, dinners, Thanksgiving, entertaining, lunchbox inspiration, desserts, recipes I like, recipes to try, bake day ideas -- you get the drift. You can also organize the order of your boards, to put the ones you reference most frequently at top.

Be smart about whom you follow to keep your stream uncluttered, and keep your stream's food preferences in line with your own. Nothing's more disappointing that clicking on a delicious enchilada casserole photo than learning it's made mostly out of sodium-packed canned soups.

When repinning: Click on the photo to make sure it redirects you to the specific URL with the recipe, not a generic website or a broken link. Otherwise, the pin is relatively useless. This also gives proper credit to the original photographer and poster.

Write meaningful descriptions of the photos, including keywords and tags (using @). This helps you sort through your pins and makes them more useful to other readers.

Add a price to your description, if relevant. The price will show up on the thumbnail and saves readers (and yourself) the trouble of having to open the link, if you're working on a budget.

Get the app. You can download a Pinterest app for your phone or iPad, which comes in handy if you're grocery shopping and need to quickly reference a recipe.

Pin directly from almost any webpage by installing the bookmark to your web browser.

I am a member of the growing, new breed of foodies -- a modern, technology-supported culinary creator. I am a Pinterest chef. ("Chef" in the loosest form.)

I would never feel confident enough to say I know how to cook. Recipe books intimidate me. Spice racks tease me with their mystery. I have a reputation for humiliating myself at my mother-in-law's annual Bake Day in December. You wouldn't believe the ways I have mangled chocolate-chip cookies. (Tip: If you wrap cookie dough around a marshmallow, it melts into a pool of burned sugar; it does not create a mallow-filled sugar ball of delight. Don't add Cheetos on top to try to "save" it.)

The kitchen hates me. Yet somehow, when supported by the training wheels of the visually stimulating virtual pin board, Pinterest.com, I can conquer the cumin and rise to nearly any doughy occasion.

Pinterest is holding my hand through Thanksgiving dinner this year. And based on the endless stream of photos of turkeys, casserole dishes, pumpkin fill-in-the-blanks and variations of stuffing, many other local families are inviting Pinterest to the big dinner, too.

Local food bloggers are hopping on the trend, with their own original pins linking to seasonal dishes and drinks. They use Pinterest for different reasons: free marketing, trend research, info organization, and culinary inspiration (more so than direction) to kick their kitchens up a notch.

For the novice cook, first and foremost, Pinterest is a gateway. You can "pin" recipe ideas or simply pretty pictures (food porn) into various "boards" without actually doing a thing, and no one knows otherwise. This is how I got hooked. Ooh, look at that pretty display of strawberries and blueberries. Pin. Oh wait, that's a recipe for fruit and cream pie? And I have a party coming up? Looks easy enough. I'll try it. If it bombs, it'll be my little secret. No one needs to know about my food porn addiction. (Except my 190 followers.)

Pinterest boards are like folders on your computer to organize information, except they're online, public, center around the photos, and are each hyperlinked to various websites where you can read the full recipe. For visual learners, this is paramount.

Pinterest makes it one-click-away easy to share your fave recipes via e-mail and on other social networks (Facebook, Twitter). For more experienced cooks, it's also an easy way to organize your original or family recipes. Upload your own photo linking to your blog, or type the directions into the description if they're short and simple.

Or do it the lazy cheater way like I do and take a picture of your written recipe and upload that photo. This method is clearly for shortsighted, personal organization -- as food bloggers like Sarah Welle, of Longmont, agree that the way to make a recipe go viral starts with a stunning photo. On Pinterest, the tastability comes second to presentation.

Is it beautiful?

The emphasis on aesthetics is what makes Pinterest a natural fit for Welle and her co-blogging Longmont friend, Dulcie Wilcox. They launched a food blog, two-tarts.com, a few years ago as a way to share their love of food photography. In fact, many of their recipe choices stem from the question: Is it beautiful? You'll notice they have few meat main courses because, well, meat is not photogenic, Welle admits.

Two Tarts doesn't have a Thanksgiving turkey recipe. But it does have pumpkin muffins with cream cheese centers, apple brie tarts and a pear-vanilla-vodka cocktail that have recently been repinned hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

"It's a fun way to see what's popular, and people comment on their pins. People are more free with comments than on your website, because it's their own pin," Welle says. "It's surprising to see what takes off. It's kind of hard to predict."

You could say Pinterest found Two Tarts, not the other way around. One day, Welle says she noticed a ton of traffic coming from the site, which she knew nothing about. People were pinning her recipes, and it was helping drive, about 4,000 views on average per day. This time of year through the holidays, that number surges to upwards of 10,000 clicks per day.

For chefs, restaurants and bloggers like Welle, Pinterest is free marketing, a way to drive traffic to their sites and an easy way to organize and promote their creations.

Welle says she doesn't use Pinterest to get inspiration as much as she does to share her ideas and inspiration with others.

The pinned pictures do inspire Angela Baccetti Kemper, a Firestone mother of two kids under the age of two. She plans on using Pinterest to get some creative Thanksgiving decoration ideas, and she found a simple oyster cracker snack recipe that she's making to gift to her grandmother for the holiday. (Oyster crackers plus one package of ranch dressing mix plus veggie oil, garlic powder and salt.)

She also found a recipe for whipped cream cheese frosting that she planned to use for her two daughters' joint birthday party.

"I don't know if I can do it, but we'll try anyway," Kemper says. "You see these beautiful pictures and you're like, 'I want to make that.' It's inspiring -- but it doesn't always turn out that way. Sometimes it's not even close."

Grace Boyle is a Boulder food writer and blogger who uses Pinterest to share her work, but she also has nearly 400 pins under her board "Food. My first love." Those are recipes that she wants to play with. She prefers to follow food bloggers on Pinterest above using the RSS feed, bookmarks or browsing their sites.

"I find if I follow them on Pinterest, I can repin and share and it's easy and digestible," Boyle says. "In Google, you have to sift through links. It's very easy, and I get to choose who's in my feed. You can't do that with Google."

Sometimes she creates focused boards for specific occasions. Like right now, she's planning recipes for her friend's 30th birthday party. This year, she is hosting Thanksgiving dinner at her apartment, so she's creating a specific board to organize all of the ideas in one place.

Still, Boyle admits no website can substitute for her favorite cookbooks.

"I won't ever replace that," she says.

Pinterest is also a frugal foodie's paradise, because it's easy to search. Wondering what to do with your leftover sweet potatoes? Search "sweet potato recipes," read reviews right up front, and quickly determine which one is popular by which is repinned the most. It's like googling recipes with 200 friends hovering over your shoulder to help you sift through the endless options.

And this leads you to like-minded pinners to follow. For me, that began as busy mamas who relied on a personal chef to do all of the work, and by that I mean Crock-Pot. I found the Crockin' Girls. Their no-brainer recipes gave me confidence to keep pinning and playing, until -- at my own pace as I slowly figured things out -- I branched out. Before I knew it, I was making most things from scratch. And that spice rack was saving me money, replacing preservative-filled pre-mades, and not so scary after all. OK, maybe a little. Especially the saffron.

Yes, my mom could have taught me this. Yes, I could have taken a class, or read a book. But I never would have. I needed something that was pretty and fun to meet me where I was: online.

I've since tried (and more importantly actually consumed) more than 40 Pinterest recipes, and I have a list of more than 100 to attempt. I've had a few dramatic fails, like an enchilada casserole that used not one but two different kinds of cream of fill-in-the-blank soup (dry heave!). But I'm blaming that one on my husband; he pinned it, not me.

I am already prepping for Bake Day this year. I've found pages of tried and true marshmallow chocolate chip cookie recipes. But I also found a link for (relatively healthy) Chocolate Ninja Bread Men from scratch, made with cacao powder, spelt flour, cinnamon, ginger, dark brown sugar and molasses.

Directions: Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Completely remove the giblets from inside of the chicken. Wash the inside and outside of the chicken with cold water. Next, pat dry with paper towels inside and outside the chicken.

Thoroughly season the inside of the chicken with salt and pepper.

Cut the apple, onions and lemons into quarters. Stuff the cavity of the chicken with the lemon, apple, half of the onion quarters and a spring of thyme. Note: Choose whatever vegetables are in season or taste great roasted, to your liking.

Take the softened butter and mix with garlic, thyme, salt, pepper and paprika. Mix well. With your fingers, separate the skin from the meat of the chicken without tearing the skin off. Gently, rub the butter mixture underneath the skin of the breasts. Once done thoroughly spreading the butter under the skin, season the outside of the chicken with salt and pepper.

Tuck the chicken thighs and wings closer to the body (make it compact) so it cooks evenly.

In a baking pan, place the chicken in the center and surround the chicken with the remaining chopped onion, potatoes and sweet potatoes.

Bake for approximately 11/2 hours or until the juices have run clear and the chicken is golden brown.

Let the chicken sit for about 15 minutes, then carve and serve.

Source: local pinner and food blogger Grace Boyle

Vanilla, Pear and Vodka Cocktail

12 ounces (11/2 cups) pear juice

6 ounces vodka

1/2 vanilla bean, seeds scraped

Vanilla sugar, for rim

1 cup ice, plus more to serve over

Directions: Mix pear juice and vodka in a pitcher or shaker. Split open the vanilla bean, and scrape the seeds into the juice and vodka. Add 1 cup ice, then give it a good shake. Pour into cocktail glasses over more ice and serve with sugared rim. Makes 4 drinks.

Directions: For the crust from Alice Waters: Mix the flour and salt together. Cut or work the butter cubes into the flour mixture, leaving some fairly large irregular pieces. I do this in the food processor, and just hit pulse a few times until it just becomes irregular and grainy. Pour in about 3/4 of the ice water, pulse a few more times, then add the rest of the water if needed until the mixture sticks together into a rough ball.

Divide the dough into two, wrap in plastic, flatten into discs, and refrigerate for a few minutes or days (depending on when you want to use the dough, you can make it a day or two in advance).

Roll one of the discs out in a circle to fit a 10-inch tart pan. No need to prebake the crust. Save the other for another use.

For the filling: Slice the brie into 1/4-inch thick planks. Core and quarter the apples. Then slice them as thinly as possible. Line the bottom of the tart evenly with slices of brie, then top with the apple slices.

To arrange the apple slices, start at the outer edge to create the first circle of overlapping pieces. Line the pieces up very closely in order to create a good total thickness of apple for the top of the tart -- you don't want to wind up with a paper thin layer of apples in the end. For the center, stand the apples up with skins out in concentric circles to form a rose shape. Bend the apples into smaller and smaller circles to create the pretty rose shape. I learned to do it online at http://aspicyperspective.com/2011/09/brie-and-pear-tart.html, which is also the source of my recipe inspiration.

Bake at 400 for 40 minutes -- until the brie is bubbling up and golden.

Let rest and cool for at least 15 minutes before cutting and serving. This helps it hold together and not completely slip apart due to the hot bubbling brie.

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